August 20, 2013

Simulating Nightmares

In keeping with the chipper and upbeat nature of the last post, one of the Brickmuppet's crack team of Science Babes informs us that the Federation of American Scientists has recently started running simulations of various scenarios involving nuclear exchanges between the USA and China.

This is a sobering document. The scenarios examined would seem to be beyond possibility...until one remembers the events of 1914 and 1939.

A couple of things leap out. Fallout shelters, despite the protests of
the ignorant are a very good thing to have in this sort of situation.

Neutrality does not apply to Tijuana, Quebec, our friends the Bahamians or the Maritimes.

I question the FAS's targeting assumptions, although it cheers me
greatly not to see a big smouldering scab in place of Hampton Roads, I
can't fathom that an area with this many military assets would escape
while they'd waste a missile on Detroit. This dubious supposition may
reflect the fact that China's nuclear deterrent is counter-value, not
counter-force, that is, the Chinese ICBMs target cities rather than US
Missile batteries. Chinese missiles have big 3 or 5 megaton city buster
warheads (assumed to be 4MT in the FAS study).

Ewww...

The FAS study assumes that China has around 20 ICBMs which is the official line, but the Russians credit them with a somewhat larger ICBM force and around 1800 warheads albeit mostly medium range for use against Russia and India and only half on alert. Other estimates go as higher.

The US by contrast can't currently make new nukes and isn't developing any. The FOGBANK fiasco from a few years ago shows what can happen when a technological capability atrophies.

This has implications.

Deterrence rests on the assumption that an attack on the US is national suicide. If the US is attacked by nukes right now it will go full Jacksonian as is our habit when we are REALLY pissed off. The rape of Atlanta or the bombardment of Japan will pale in comparison to what would befall the entity stupid enough to do such a thing. US bombs have much lower yields than other nations but they are all over 300 kilotons and there are about 2000 of them. A society that incited the use of such weapons upon itself would pass into history as completely as the Minoans, the Toltecs or the Carthaginians. This is true for most of the other nuclear nations as well. That's why there haven't been any nuclear attacks since Nagasaki. Note though that as our deterrent decays and/ or is whittled away in arms control treaties the notion that a nation, especially one led by admirers of Mao Tse-Tung might come to the conclusion after ruthless cost benefit studies of omelets versus eggs that any retaliation would be endurable.

The FAS study is science fiction now, it's an exceedingly unlikely set of scenarios. However that may not be the case in a decade or so.

There's also the unpleasant possibility of a nuclear nation in the grip of someone who is utterly bat-scat bonkers and to whom deterrence is of limited value...which brings up a question I've had for a couple of months about the seemingly 'gimp' performance of the North Korean nuclear tests. None have even been as powerful as Little Boy. The biggest was 10 kilotons and a few were only a few hectotons, but it occurs to me that these are all in the ballpark of the weapons built around the now decomissioned W-54 warhead the US developed in the 1960's. Weighing only about 50 pounds its yield could be varied from 200 tons of TNT to one kiloton. It was used in backpack bombs, air to air and air to ground missiles and a perfectly functional but somewhat dubiously conceived atomic bazooka. Impressively, the W-54 warhead was able to give a yield of 6 kilotons as demonstrated in the SOCORRO shot of the Hardtack 2 test series, though tactical applications of the weapons that used it required lower yields.

Because the bazooka only had a range of 2.5 miles so 6 kilotons would be demoralizing to the bazookateers.

I mention this because it is possible that North Korea might not be botching their tests. They might be trying to build something akin to the 50 year old W-54. 50 pounds....suddenly those IRBMs which can (occasionally) put a 200 pound satellite into orbit have a rather different potential. The ability to put 7 or so 1-6 kiloton devices in the general vicinity of a city (I'm certainly not talking about MIRV's ) might be available in a few years. If small weapons are what their developing however, a much more likely threat (assuming that they ARE crazy) might be as backpack nukes delivered to terrorists. Note that Iran and North Korea are cooperating regards rocketry and nukes.

1
Why do they think the Chinese are operating on a value-vs.-capacity strategic framework? The Soviets weren't during the Cold War, and American assumptions otherwise resulted in a lot of mis-deployment and strategic malinvestment. I'd hate to think that they're just repeating the mirroring errors of previous generations.

As to why ground zero is the administration building at ODU...I have no comment.

Switching to a completely different topic, did you ever get credit for that class that you posted about a while back?

I passed a radiological monitoring class back in the mid-80's, and bought the same, Cold War model radiation detector after 9-11. However, it's not exactly user-friendly. Maybe I should get one of those new-fangled digital models...

They've been trying to run their plutonium breeding cycle too long, to get a larger yield of plutonium out of it.

Which works, but it has the drawback that you get a lot more Pu240 and Pu241 mixed in with your Pu239, and that makes the weapon detonation change.

Those low-yield blasts have been bombs in which the critical mass wasn't assembled fast enough, well enough, to produce full yield. (The technical term is "fizzle".) Excess 240 and 241 in the plutonium is almost certainly the reason why.

Low yield small nukes aren't based on Uranium or Plutonium. They use different isotopes entirely, and North Korea doesn't have the ability to create those kinds of isotopes.

4
I should say, that low yield nukes aren't based exclusively on uranium and plutonium. They require a hot neutron source in the package, made of some other element/isotope entirely. North Korea doesn't have the ability to create that other stuff. (It requires a particle accelerator and they don't have one.)

Why do they think the Chinese are operating on a value-vs.-capacity
strategic framework? The Soviets weren't during the Cold War, and
American assumptions otherwise resulted in a lot of mis-deployment and
strategic malinvestment. I'd hate to think that they're just repeating
the mirroring errors of previous generations.

I think it has to do with their assumed small number of ICBMS . The idea is they cant make a meaningful dent in the us nuclear force but can eliminate 20 cities which would devastate the country for years.

I'm pretty sure that that early on the USSR actually DID focus on a countervalue strategy for similar reasons, however as their accuracy and number of missiles increased dramatically they eventually switched to both....as you point out this was not appreciated at the time.

"As this year will mark Chairman Mao's 120th birthday, we must turn
Chairman Mao's old residence into a base for patriotism and
revolutionary education, in particular to make it play a greater role in
the education of the younger generation,"

On top of that, it turns out that Xi Jinping was in charge of the whole 'poke Japan with a stick' strategy which was initiated by his office and since he took the presidency, the actions regarding the Senkakus have been tightly controlled by him directly. That article also offhandedly mentions this alarming incident from January which got very little if any press here in the states...

Two Jian-10 fighters took off from an air base outside Shanghai and
followed a U.S. airborne warning and control aircraft, which carries a
surveillance system for tracking other planes, north of the Senkaku
Islands at a close distance, the sources said.

Two F-15 fighters of the Air Self-Defense Force then took off to counter the Chinese move, the sources said.

The United States has been deploying airborne warning and
control aircraft since mid-January following China’s violation of
Japanese airspace near the islands in December.

According to the Defense Ministry, SDF fighters were
scrambled against Chinese aircraft as many as 91 times between October
and December.

(Emphasis mine.)

Nintey one times in three months.
Plus.. back in January, the Chinese sent out a bunch of fighters to buz a US scout plane...(disturbingly similar to what happened in the Hainan incident) and the Japanese responded by sending in the Calvary.

I had no idea there were military air incursions of Japanese airspace let alone that they were that frequent on top of the naval incursions. This is Cold War stuff. Good grief! It's no wonder the Japanese are jumpy.

While this situation still seems unlikely to immediately go pear shaped it is a hell of a lot more serious than is generally supposed.

Under international law all resources within 250 miles of a nations shore belong to that country so these little rocks are far more important than one would think. Especially since they're smack blab in the middle of Japan's fishing waters and a natural gas field.